While the Renaissance
in Florence was exhausting itself by the very splendour of its own
achievement, artists in Venice were exploring a different set of pictorial
possibilities. The difference between these two great schools of the Italian
Renaissance can be summed up as follows: to a Florentine of 1480 a
painting was composed of shape/design
plus colour; whereas to a Venetian of 1520 it was shape/design
fused with colour. In Florence, colour (colorito),
however harmonious, was a quality to be added to design (disegno).
In Venice it was inseparable from design. To a Florentine it was
an attribute of the object to which it belonged: a red dress or a green
tree were patches of red and green confined within the boundaries of those
objects. The Venetians meanwhile thought of colour as a quality without
which the dress or the tree could hardly be said to exist. It permeated
everything and flowed across contours like light. The structural
unity of Florentine painting gave place to the chromatic unity
of Venetian. In Venice, colour
gave the canvas life, and an artist's skill in mixing and using
colour pigments was
critical. The importance which Venetians placed on colour explains in
part why they adopted oil painting more
enthusiastically than their counterparts in Florence, since oil paint
gave artists greater depth and luminosity of colour than tempera.
For the impact of Venice painters on European art, see: Legacy
of Venetian Painting (after 1600).

It is in the paintings of Giovanni
Bellini (1430-1516) - son of Jacopo Bellini (1400-70) -
that this new quality is first seen, but before following the pattern
of Bellini's long career it will be necessary to focus our attention on
the city of Padua in the middle years of the quattrocento,
when Andrea Mantegna
(1430-1506) was the dominant artistic influence and the Bellini family,
Giovanni and his brother Gentile
Bellini (c.1429-1507), looked to him for guidance.

Padua - then a centre of Early
Renaissance painting - must have provided a congenial background for
the precocious young artist. At the Academy of Francesco
Squarcione - a mediocrity among painters but evidently a stern
and efficient teacher - Mantegna learned his craftsmanship. In the cultural
air of the city he acquired an almost fanatical reverence for the legendary
power and majesty of ancient Rome. Through the remains of Roman architecture
and sculpture, which Mantegna studied assiduously, he was able to reconstruct
in his mind a vivid picture of the great pre-Christian past, and in his
religious paintings it emerged
as a world of immense and uncompromising power. His forms are hard and
sculptural. They have the same metallic intensity as those of Andrea
del Castagno (c.1420-57), but they are more finely and even more scientifically
constructed. (See the effect of Mantegna's foreshortening
technique in his Lamentation
over the Dead Christ.) In the Eremitani Chapel of Padua he painted
the story of the martyrdom of St James, destroyed, alas, in the Second
World War. In Mantua he filled the little Camera
degli Sposi in the Ducal palace with frescoes of the Gonzaga family,
and on the ceiling he painted the first trompe-l'oeil
worm's-eye view, the earliest experiment in visual illusionism - a method
of fresco painting later perfected as quadratura
by Correggio - see his Assumption
of the Virgin (Parma Cathedral) (1526-30); by Pietro
da Cortona - see his Allegory
of Divine Providence (1633-39, Palazzo Barberini); and Andrea
Pozzo - see his Apotheosis
of St Ignatius (1688-94, Sant'Ignazio, Rome).

Giovanni Bellini's sister, Niccolosia,
had married Mantegna; the two artists were exactly the same age. From
the very beginning Giovanni was completely dominated by the power and
austerity of his new brother-in-law. Yet even in his early works there
is a note of gentleness and pathos that reveals the difference between
the two contemporaries. The difference was to increase throughout Bellini's
life until, at the end of it, no one could have guessed at the harsh discipline
of his youth. For Giovanni was to lay the foundations of all that was
musical, sensuous, and glowing in later Venetian art.

Back in Venice, Giovanni moved slowly towards
the point where light and colour become paramount ingredients in his art.
His pupils, Giorgione and Titian as well as Sebastiano
del Piombo (1485-1547), seized on the new discovery, gradually relaxing
their linear tension and their structural sense, and replacing them by
a set of glowing harmonies that had their origin in light rather than
colour. Florentine colour had never been timid; it was, at its best, as
intense as anything the Venetians could achieve but it did not radiate
or burn. Titian's colour is often almost subdued, Tintoretto's gloomy,
Veronese's muffled, but Titian's greys and dull purples have more fire
in them than Fra Angelico's vermilions and pale ultramarines. In fact
Titian set his foot on the road that led directly to nineteenth-century
Impressionism in that he did not paint
the thing-as-he-knew-it, but, the thing-as-he-saw-it. A green hillside
can be purple if it is in the shadow, a brown field scarlet if it is seen
at sunset. Titian did not push his researches anything like as far as
did French impressionists, but in all his paintings there is a sensuous
pervasion of light that ties all the parts together in a closer relationship
than they ever had before, and in particular binds the figures and the
landscape into a single harmony.

Landscape painting had
not yet reached the point where it could exist in its own right without
the justification of figures, but Venetian landscape fused itself intimately
with the figures, whereas in Florentine painting it was seldom more than
a theatre backcloth. The extreme example of this Venetian fusion is Giorgione's
Tempest
(1506-8) (Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice), that enigmatic masterpiece
which can be classified neither as a landscape in which the foreground
figures are disturbingly important nor as a figure
painting in which the landscape plays an unusually dominant part.
It is in this picture that one first notices a new method of composition
which was later to become the landscape painter's favourite system. The
normal Florentine painting is based on the pyramid, the picture piled
up more or less symmetrically round a central mass. Giorgione's picture
has no central mass: on the contrary, its centre is a gap through which
the eye is invited to pass in order to penetrate into the further recesses
of the landscape.

A change of mood runs parallel to the change
of method. A languor creeps in and an opulence that bear witness to a
more worldly view of life. In Giorgione's Fete Champetre the young
men and maidens are no longer alert and eager-eyed. They are creatures
of leisures enjoying the summer afternoon; and though this, again, is
an extreme case, the same glowing languor runs through much of the later
work of Giovanni Bellini, the whole of Giorgione, and a high percentage
of Titian.

It was Giovanni Bellini who laid the foundations
for the whole of this remarkable change of mood and method. The triple
climax of Florentine painting had been prepared for by a dozen artists
of the fifteenth century, each of whom had contributed to the cumulative
heritage of Leonardo
(1452-1519), Michelangelo
(1475-1564), and Raphael (1483-1520).
The pattern of development of the Renaissance
in Venice was different. In Venice the climax was prepared for by
one man: it was from Giovanni Bellini that his two famous pupils,
Giorgione and Titian, drew almost everything that we think of as being
typically Venetian. Yet though Giovanni prepared the ground for his successors,
he did so very gradually, developing slowly and steadily, pushing his
researches a little further each year in his long career, intensifying
the inner glow and adding to it a lyric note that was to be fully developed
by Giorgione.

An early landmark in this long progress
is the Ecstasy
of St Francis (Frick Collection, New York) where the saint steps
out from his grotto into a landscape full of light and air and lifts his
eyes to the sun. Bellini always liked to place his saints and Madonnas
in an open-air setting, and as he grew older the landscapes became warmer,
more golden, more habitable. One of his favourite types of Christian
art was the Pieta - the dead Christ
with angels or saints - and even when he was frankly under Mantegna's
influence, these pictures have a degree of pathos of which Mantegna was
incapable. In his middle years he painted a series of little pagan allegories
(now in the Venetian Accademia), fanciful, steeped in lyric poetry,
the earliest examples of the kind of painting in which Venice later specialized
- the poesia - the picture in which the precise meaning of the
subject-matter hardly seems to count: in which the dreamlike pagan mood
is everything. Towards the end of his life this pagan note became more
resonant till it reached its climax in The Feast of the Gods painted
in 1513 for Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. This, perhaps, is the Venetian
answer to Raphael's Parnassus. It is rustic, pastoral, Dionysian,
and it makes Raphael's fresco, for all its pictorial science and its noble
grandeur, look a little cold and manufactured by contrast. Bellini's Olympians
are gathered together on a summer evening in the wooded hinterland of
the Veneto. Raphael's Parnassians exhibit themselves in front of beautifully
painted scenery.

These are the expressions of Giovanni's
poetic imagination. But throughout his life he continued to paint formal
altarpiece art - the Virgin enthroned with
attendant saints in an architectural setting, glowing with gold mosaic
in a subdued golden light. Each time he tackled the hackneyed theme he
produced a new variation on it, and each time the Madonna herself achieves
a new and tenderer femininity. For the contrast between Tuscan thought
and philosophy and Venetian poetry and music is accompanied by an equally
significant contrast between Tuscan virility and the Venetian worship
of the feminine ideal. The St Job altarpiece now in the Venetian
Accademia, is a typical example of his big altarpieces. It was painted
in his prime at the age of fifty. So solemn is it in its general effect
that the sensuous Venetian elements in it are hardly perceptible, but
they are there. The Madonna and her companions seem to be listening to
the music: action is suspended: taken in isolation the three lute-playing
angels below the throne are among the most typically Venetian incidents
in Giovanni's oeuvre. See also his: San
Zaccaria Altarpiece (1505, Church of San Zaccaria, Venice).

For more about altarpiece painting in
Venice, by Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto and others, see: Venetian
altarpieces (c.1500-1600).

None of Giovanni Bellini's contemporaries
possessed either his nobility or his poetry. They were excellent, conservative
painters: craftsmen of a high order, upholders but not creators of the
Venetian tradition. Carlo Crivelli (c.1430-93) - the oldest of
them - was mannered and elegant. Vittore
Carpaccio (c.1465-1525/6) is the most lovable; he is best known
for the colourful and animated pageantry of his series of paintings of
the legend of St Ursula, which contains one surprising picture, The
Vision of St Ursula. Here, for once, Carpaccio achieves a note of
magical, quiet intimacy that neither he himself ever repeated nor any
other Venetian ever achieved. Other Venetian painters, contemporary with
Giovanni Bellini - Basaiti, Montagna, Cima of Conegliano
- produced charming but unimportant variations on the Venetian theme.

By the time that Giorgione and Titian,
as young men, had entered the Bellini studio as apprentices, the Venetian
painting tradition had been firmly established. Their task was to assimilate
that tradition and take it to its logical conclusion, and each of them
did so in his own way.

Giorgione (1477-1510)

Giorgione
(Giorgio da Castelfranco) was one of the tragic young men of art, like
Schubert and Keats, who died young because the gods hate anti-climax.
Giorgione would certainly have developed had he lived, but he could never
in later life have created anything that so perfectly combined worldliness
with purity as the small but precious handful of paintings by which he
is best known, and the rather more numerous pictures whose authenticity
is hotly disputed by art historians. Nonetheless, he remains one of the
most enigmatic of all Old Masters produced
in Venice. In his painting he seems to embrace pleasure fearlessly, and
yet it it pleasure purged of every trace of grossness by the pastoral
sweetness of his landscapes and the lyrical grace of his figures.

Common to them all is a mood that we have
learned to call the Giorgionesque. It is a mood often achieved in poetry,
seldom in painting. We do not 'examine' Giorgione's paintings or look
to them for narrative content. We submit to them and let them work their
will on us as they did on his contemporaries, to such an extent that during
his own lifetime his fame eclipsed that of Titian. What Giorgione added
to the mainstream of Venetian painting was something that exactly satisfied
the Venetian appetite for the lyrical and musical side of art. The famous
Castelfranco Madonna - painted for the little town in which he
was born - is quite formal and unadventurous in design, yet it has the
unmistakeable introspective, brooding quality we associate with him. The
Tempest, his first authentic work, is like the quiet music of a
song whose words are too enigmatic to survive analysis. The two figures
in the foreground are lost in their own thoughts and pay no attention
to each other. The landscape between them is part of their day-dream.
The Sleeping Venus
(1510, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden), naked though she is, has
no erotic overtones. Her long, smooth limbs belong to Nature, not to Mankind.
The Fete Champetre in the Louvre is more robust, but even here
the picture's subject is the expectant pause before music is heard on
a summer's afternoon.

There exist plenty of Giorgionesque pictures
painted in or near Venice in the early years of the sixteenth century
whose authorship will probably never be decided. They are the inevitable
sequel to a new personal discovery.

Titian (c.1488-1576)

The only artist who need be mentioned as
a follower of Giorgione is Titian
(Tiziano Vecellio) - who, in the years immediately following Giorgione's
death in 1510, painted one or two masterpieces in the same idyllic vein,
of which the most famous is Sacred and Profane Love. Titian didn't
have Giorgione's aristocracy, but his stature was greater still. He lived
to be an old man, and his vast output is uneven in quality; the best of
it is stamped not by aristocracy, but by energetic nobility. There is
less refinement but more big-heartedness in it than in Giorgione's. As
he grew older his knowledge of the play of light grew more and more profound;
he saw his world less and less in terms of contour and more and more in
terms of shimmering surface, and his style grew broader and more impressionist.
His imagination was seldom of the highest order. It is only rarely that
he can bring one face to face with the tense moment when all emotional
threads seem to be tied together. He did achieve it once or twice, as
in the Entombment in the Louvre, but such pictures are exceptional.
It is the whole glowing corpus of his work that counts, not the isolated
masterpiece.

Titian was probably, but not certainly,
born around 1485-8 in the village of Cadore high up in a Dolomite valley.
Some authorities are reluctant to accept an earlier date, presumably because
the year of his death, 1576, is known and it seems highly improbable that
any artist of the time could survive and retain full possession of his
creative faculties beyond a certain point. Whatever the precise chronology,
he died a very old man, and, as though he knew that he had no need for
precocity, he matured late. He was apprenticed first to Zuccato
a master of mosaic art, then to Gentile
Bellini, and afterwards to his brother Giovanni. While Giorgione's talents
were ripening Titian's seem to have remained latent. It is only after
Giorgione's death, in his early youth, that Titian begins to develop.
Sacred and Profane Love (1515) is full of Giorgione's spirit -
an enigmatic idyll with a meaning that each spectator must extract for
himself. Yet it could not be by Giorgione. It is too accomplished, too
professional, too serenely beautiful, and at the same time it misses that
ultimate haunted mystery that baffles us in the best of Giorgione. It
is a picture painted under a temporary spell, as though the painter had
been trying to prove that he could, for once, produce a poesia
as potent as anything of Giorgione's, but built on more classical lines.
[See also the later and equally dreamy Venus
of Urbino (1538, Uffizi Gallery, Florence), which was modelled
on Giorgione's Reclining Venus (1510). It remains one of the most
famous female nudes
of the Italian Renaissance.]

He was about thirty years old when he painted
Sacred and Profane Love, leaving him sixty years of productive
life ahead of him. During those sixty years he developed as steadily as
had Giovanni Bellini in the preceding generation. He was the most truly
professional painter in the history of
art, with the possible exception of Velazquez and Rembrandt. By the
end of his life he had explored most of the possibilities of which oil
painting is capable, from burning colour to grisaille,
and mastered every kind of subject, including portrait
art, sumptuous allegories, pagan mythologies, history
painting, as well as numerous forms of ecclesiastical art, including
Church mural painting and altar panel
paintings - and every mood, ranging from dreamy lyricism, through
blithe erotic paganism, dignified nobility, full-blooded rhetoric, dramatic
action to, in the end, tragic resignation. Arguably one of the best
history painters (note: in the sense of istoria, or narrative),
he had certain limitations, the limitations that must accompany such robust
strength. But if there is one man whose influence as a master of the full
range of expression in colour pigment has been felt by almost every European
artist of note, it is Titian. (See for instance: Titian
and Venetian Colour Painting c.1500-76.) The heroic Christian energy
of the Frari Assumption, as well as the heroic pagan energy of
the Bacchus and
Ariadne (1520-23) and Bacchanal
of the Andrians (1523-5) are typical of his middle years, as is
the portrait of reds - Pope
Paul III with his Grandsons (1546, Capodimonte, Naples), one of
the greatest portrait paintings
of the Venetian School. See also: Venetian
Portrait Painting (c.1400-1600).

Then comes, with ripening age, a new drama
- the drama of light, in which contours lose themselves and colour becomes
less brilliant but more vibrant. A mysterious profundity pervades both
the religious and the pagan pictures of his later years. Among the latter
one could single out the Rape of Europa, wild and abandoned in
composition; among the former, his last tragic picture, the Pieta,
left unfinished at his death in 1576, in which colour itself has almost
been replaced by fitful light, and light has become the brooding expression
of an old man's final dream.

Of Titian's minor contemporaries little
needs to be said. Palma Vecchio (1480-1528) added a touch of opulence
and a softer roundness to the Venetian interpretation of womanhood, and
occasionally, as in Jacob and Rachel, painted a full-scale poetic
idyll, softer and less heroic than anything by Titian, but full of space
and warmth and the full glow of Venetian colour. Jacopo
Bassano (1515-1592) introduced a rustic note into those idyllic
outdoor scenes that the Venetians loved. With Giovanni Savoldo
(1506-48) the grand poetic rhythms begin to run dry. He is a true Venetian
in his choice of subject and his delight in colour, but he speaks in prose
where his predecessors spoke verse.

Lorenzo Lotto
(1480-1556)

The most interesting and individual of
Titian's contemporaries is Lorenzo
Lotto (1480-1556) who, though Venetian by birth, broke away from
Venice and the strong local influences which might have robbed him of
his own strange personality, and painted in Rome, in Bergamo, and in Treviso.
He is a haunted artist. There is little of the Venetian's frank acceptance
of the joy of life, and none of their inherent grandeur in his work. A
sadness, an unease, seems to transpose all his pictures from the major
to the minor key, and when he is dramatic, as he can often be, it is an
anxious, strained, interior drama in which he specializes. Even his portraits
often strike a slightly sinister note.

When Titian died, his fame had become legendary,
not only in his native Venice, but throughout Europe. The old man, who
for nearly three-quarters of a century had dominated the art of his time,
had surely taken its secret with him to the grave. To his admirers it
must have seemed that this was the end of the Venetian school, the unbroken
cycle of development that had stretched from the bright, youthful pictures
of Giovanni Bellini to the dark tragedy of a century later. Yet one more
giant, Veronese, was to provide a final climax to Venetian sumptuousness
and invent a still more elaborate pageantry. And an even more fiery genius,
Tintoretto, was to make a new set of discoveries and open up a dynamic
world that had never been adumbrated before in Venetian painting but which,
none the less, become recognizably Venetian in Tintoretto's hands.

Paolo Veronese
(1528-1588)

Paolo
Veronese, a native of Verona, came to Venice in his twenty-seventh
year, and there practised his delectable art for the rest of his life.
What he achieved during the busy thirty-three years in his adopted city,
was something that Venice had been waiting for since the disappearance
of Vittore Carpaccio (1460-1525) - a joyous expression of the colour
and pageantry of Venetian life at its gayest and its most ceremonious.
Veronese's temperament is like that of Carpaccio in that he loved the
urban settings of fine architecture with pageantry in the foreground.
Since Carpaccio's day a new style (Mannerism)
had been introduced into Venetian painting, a more decorous ceremonial,
a more luxurious way of life, larger gestures, richer robes, a franker
sensuousness. But, allowing for the emerging Mannerist
painting, Veronese is Carpaccio reincarnate. No one has ever painted
grander festive scenes or more colourful mythologies. Like Carpaccio he
was incapable of deep emotion; pathos or tragedy were distasteful to him.
Like Carpaccio he was an exquisite colourist. Gold and silver, amethyst
and coral, peacock blue and olive green sing in his pictures. On the ceilings
of the Ducal Palace he provided sumptuous allegories, and in the little
anteroom that leads to the Hall of the Collegio is his version of the
story of the Rape of Europa - gracious, carefree, and exquisite,
a prophecy of eighteenth-century make-believe, which only reveals its
superficiality when compared with Titian's version of the same theme.
Along with his enormous celebratory Wedding
Feast at Cana (1562-3) in the Benedictine monastery San Giorgio
Maggiore, and his Feast
in the House of Levi (1573), his greatest achievement in the Ducal
Palace is the huge Apotheosis of Venice on the ceiling of the Hall
of the Grand Council - the most stylish and the proudest piece of large-scale
rhetoric in a city devoted to rhetoric.

The emergence of the movement known as
Baroque art occurred about the beginning of
the seventeenth century. In Tintoretto
, one is getting very near to it. Far more than Titian he is a link between
Renaissance art and the more turbulent
Baroque painting. In him both light
and colour are almost independent of structure. Tintoretto will boldly
throw a whole group of figures into deep shadow, or allow the light to
pick out and isolate a hand or knee. His composition no longer follows
the contours, but builds itself up in masses of tone and colour. He breaks
away from the Renaissance system of symmetry and frontality and permits
himself to paint a Crucifixion from the side or to visualize a Last
Supper in which the table is seen in diagonal perspective. He anticipates
Rubens in his tumultuous rhythms
and Rembrandt in his preoccupation
with light.

Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) was apprenticed
as a boy to Titian, but was expelled from his studio after ten days owing
to Titian's jealousy, according to the account of Ridolfi, his earliest
biographer. The incident is significant, since it left Tintoretto without
a master in an age when studio apprenticeship was almost essential to
a young artist's career.

The young man at once set about teaching
himself, inventing new devices for training himself as a painter, using
small figures of day arranged in artificially-lit settings like model
theatres. The result is immediately visible even in his earliest work,
in which a sense of deep space combined with surprisingly dramatic effects
of light open up a new set of pictorial possibilities. But apart from
these innovations, Tintoretto's dynamic character, his passion for figures
in movement, and the furious speed at which he worked introduce a new
and turbulent note into Venetian painting. His art
is no longer the carefully arranged tableaux of High
Renaissance tradition. The spectator is, as it were, dragged into
the thick of the action like an eye-witness. The essence of Tintoretto
is to be found at the Scuola of San Rocco in Venice which contains
what is probably the largest collection of works by one artist in any
single building; and as a prearranged iconographical scheme runs through
the whole series the effect of the three great rooms is one of immense
cumulative power.

At first sight the rhetoric, the dark and
passionate seriousness and the violent movement of this religious
art are almost uncomfortably overpowering, but behind the turbulence
is an unusual depth of feeling and an understanding of the narrative content.
The great Crucifixion of San Rocco is crowded with action and incident
on a Shakespearean scale and of a Shakespearean kind. Each of the New
Testament narratives expresses the state of mind of a man who has projected
himself imaginatively into the story of the Gospels and relived it in
his own terms. The Annunciation in the Lower Hall of the Scuola
is an unforgettable conception. The angel Gabriel arrives at full speed,
flying through the door at the head of a crowd of attendant angels, while
the Virgin leans backwards under the impact of the fiery, airborne messengers.
Equally inventive and equally freed from the bonds of tradition are the
dark Agony in the Garden, the Temptation with its Miltonic
figure of Satan, and the Flight into Egypt in a landscape that
is outstanding even in this city of potential landscapes.

Tintoretto was not always a painter of
dark turbulence. The four allegories of Venice in the Ducal Palace are
among the most optimistic and radiant of Venetian mythologies. As paintings
of the nude figure even Titian never surpassed them. The Bacchus and
Ariadne is perhaps the most memorable picture in the long line of
Venetian poesie.

For details of drawings by Titian, Tintoretto
and Veronese, see: Venetian Drawing
(c.1500-1600).

Venetian Painting
Compared to Florentine Painting

So ends the succession of giants in Venetian
painting. It would be as futile to discuss whether Venice or Florence
produced the greater masterpieces as to discuss whether reason or instinct
is the more potent arbiter in human affairs. One factor - a technical
one - makes Venetian art seem closer to our own than Florentine, namely,
the changeover from tempera to oil as the normal medium for paint. Love
of surfaces as opposed to love of contour was doubtless a Venetian characteristic,
and the oil medium encouraged the development of that side of the artist's
vision. Perhaps Florence would have rejected oil painting as unsuitable
to her needs, or perhaps she would have adopted it but ignored its possibilities,
or perhaps, had it been adopted earlier, it would have revolutionized
Florentine painting.

Such speculations are vain. The two schools
are distinct both in outlook and in technique. Florence had always been
a city of philosophers and intellectuals, Venice of poets and musicians,
and her lyric genius overflowed into her art. But there was another deciding
factor in the difference between the two cities. Florence never had the
same kind of civic pride as Venice. She was an art-producing centre, and
as such supplied the needs of the Church and to a lesser extent of the
noble families. Venice, on the other hand, was a city of merchants and
palaces and great civic buildings, and the artists of Venice were called
upon to serve the city as much as the Church. The palace of the Doges
contains some of the major examples of Venetian painting, and the theme
of most of them was Venice herself. Veronese paid homage to her in the
great oval Apotheosis of Venice, but even his huge pseudo-religious
paintings - the Feast in the House of Levi, and The Wedding
Feast at Cana, for example - are really tributes to the extravagantly
colourful texture of Venetian life. There was nothing in Florence to correspond
to this aspect of civic pride - no parallel, for instance, to the ceremony
in which the Doge celebrated the marriage of Venice to the Adriatic by
throwing a ring into the sea from the state barge, the Bucentaur,
that appears in so many Venetian paintings.

There was a third factor in determining
the distinctive flavour of Venetian art. Venice looked eastwards; her
trade was with the Near East. Constantinople supplied her with some delicious
material loot, but the loot was not entirely material. Venetian taste
had an Oriental tinge. The city that could erect the half-Oriental Basilica
of St Mark, pale and glittering like an opal, was bound to develop a very
different kind of painting from the city that approved of the stern proportions
of young Brunelleschi's dome in Florence.

One might have expected the death of Tintoretto,
in the last decade of the sixteenth century, to mark the end not only
of the Golden Age of Venetian painting, but also the end of Italy's contribution
to the mainstream of European art. Yet, a century after Tintoretto's death,
just when the Italian mainstream seemed to have become too sluggish to
be interesting, Venice again gave birth to a generation of painters who
cannot be ignored even in the briefest of surveys.

Giambattista Tiepolo
(1696-1770)

By far the greatest of them was Tiepolo,
the most audacious and brilliant painter of his time, who could perhaps
best be described as an eighteenth-century reincarnation of Veronese.
If pageantry was the keynote of Veronese, swagger of the most dazzling
kind was that of Tiepolo. In all his work, but especially in his vast
ceiling paintings, there is an airy stylishness. He inherited all the
pictorial illusionism of the preceding era of Baroque art (notably trompe
l'oeil, quadratura and other similar mannerisms) including
the conception of a ceiling as a hole punched in the roof through which
could be seen a sky filled with flying and floating creatures, and the
wild rhetoric of gesture for gesture's sake. His immense virtuosity and
his elegant, acid colour make him the outstanding figure in this late
flowering of Venetian art. See in particular his Wurzburg
Residence frescoes (1750-3) in Germany, and the Apotheosis
of Spain fresco (1763-6) on the ceiling of the throne room in the
Royal Palace at Madrid. He was influenced by his fellow citizen, Piazzetta
(1683-1754), who had already pointed the way towards this new kind of
colourful rhetoric, but in playful exuberance Tiepolo far exceeded Piazzetta.

Canaletto (1697-1768)

Simultaneous with this outburst of rhetoric
was the school of Venetian painters of vedute, artists who delighted
the rich travellers engaged in the Grand Tour
of Europe by producing views of Venetian life and architecture that combined
a more or less documentary account of Venetian topography with a great
deal of Venetian fantasy and magic. Through the painting of Canaletto,
his nephew Bernardo
Bellotto (1721-80) and Francesco
Guardi (1712-93) the palaces of Venice, the Piazza of St Mark,
the busy pageantry of the Grand Canal and the picturesqueness of the smaller
canals became familiar images in every part of Europe, but especially
in the houses of English noblemen. One of the best
landscape artists in Italy, Canaletto's views of Venice became so
popular that his studio took on the functions of a factory and his style
eventually lost its earlier vitality. Guardi's Venice is more romantic
and more restless than Canaletto's, and his pictures, enchanting though
they are, contain more than a hint of the Chinoiserie
that was seeping through into Europe from the Far East and giving a new
accent to European furniture and interior decoration.

Note: Canaletto's final years coincided
with the erection of the new Venetian Academy of Fine Arts and the founding
of the collection of the Venice
Academy Gallery.

One more artist is just worthy of mention
in this group of Venetians. Pietro Longhi (1701-85) is a minor
artist, but he added a rather more intimate note to this cumulative record
of Venice by painting little genre pictures of Venetian life and incident.
He is, one might say, the Hogarth of Venice, but a small-scale, emasculated
Hogarth.

Works of Venetian painting can be seen
in some of the best art museums in Europe
and America.